Little Marco

Running a little behind, so quickly: Marco Rubio in recent days said something like "I've revoked 300 student visas or so and I think other nations would do the same: you don't want people coming into your country and opposing the government and its policies." The Secretary of State on the United States of America, the erstwhile home of the free.

Spineless idiocy. Trump was right to deride him as "Little Marco."

One of the values immigrants bring is new ideas, which means occasionally they will oppose the government. Deng Xiaopeng went to France as a student and ended up a member of the Chinese Communist Party there. You can be sure he wasn't supporting the French government in all of its endeavors.

The things that Deng saw there formed the kernel of an understanding that would allow him to lead post-Mao China out of the complete self-immolation of the Great Leap Forward of the 50s and the Cultural Revolution of the 60s-70s and bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and become one of the primary economic drivers of the last 40 years. He wasn't perfect. He ordered troops to move on and crush the uprising at Tiannanmen Square. But net net he did a lot of good in the world, and not just for the Chinese. All of our living standards are higher than they would have been in the absence of China's rise.

We want immigrants for their ideas, so we need to accept that we will disagree with some of them. Just like we have historically tolerated neo-Nazi speech in America. Which we are coming to regret.